Wednesday, June 10, 2015

The global financial crisis, which has caused such vast
financial damage to the interests of thousands of investors and working people,
and which has cost the tax payer billions of pounds to prop-up bankrupt
financial institutions, was caused, primarily, by the greed and the dishonesty
of the major banking system.

For years, the banks had engaged in a series of dishonest
and flaky practices which had generated significant profits for them and their
investors, and which had been carried out at the expense of the funds of their
depositors and customers.

There was a time, not so long ago, when the ambition of
every finance CEO was ‘to get as big a share of the customer’s wallet as
possible’. Tactics designed to ‘cross-sell, up-sell’ to clients were promoted, and
staff were encouraged to aggressively promote new products and services to
clients, designed to capture a bigger share of their capital.

It seemed you could not go into a bank or building
society without having some new financial product, credit card or loan facility
stuffed down your throat. And of course, with every new financial product, came
a commensurate encouragement to take out a PPI contract. Of course, you were
not to know that the likelihood of the PPI insurance product to operate in your
favour should you have need of recourse to its facilities was largely illusory,
you were just cheated into believing that you were somehow covered by an
insurance umbrella. That justified your taking out the loan, which in many people’s
cases, they could not really afford.

There was a kind of collective hysteria gripping the
market as ordinary working people were encouraged by slick-talking salesmen to
extend their debts, to re-mortgage their houses in order to pay for foreign
travel or holidays, secured on credit card debts.

It suddenly seemed as if the whole world was on a huge debt
binge, borrowing money without any thought of how it would be re-paid, and this
money didn’t even exist! It was being printed by the banks that were operating,
as always, with one eye on their bonus targets. These targets were becoming
more inflated and staff were being forced to work ever harder to make their
numbers, but it didn’t matter, because the banks were busily ‘securitising’ the
debts being created, and sold off to other investors who re-packaged these
debts in their turn and who sold them on to further groups, generating even
more commission for themselves and their institutions.

The whole thing became a merry-go-round of greed and
fraud, but no-one seemed to care, as long as the spin-off of constant revenues
was maintained.

These frauds were being practiced at the same time as the
more traditional models of criminality which underpinned the banks’ balance
sheets were being continued. International money laundering on an
institutionalised scale was being promoted, and the regulatory controls which
were supposed to prevent global money laundering were identified by their
absence. It was almost as if the major banks had decided to individually ignore
the rules and regulations on money laundering, because they had discovered that
the facilitation of money movements for organised crime paid significant
profits and dividends.

HSBC
were able to demonstrate this very effectively because in 2012 HSBC Holdings Plc agreed to pay a record $1.92
billion in fines to U.S. authorities for allowing itself to be used to launder
a river of drug money flowing out of Mexico and other banking lapses.

Mexico's Sinaloa cartel and Colombia's Norte del Valle
cartel between them laundered $881 million through HSBC and a Mexican unit, the
U.S. Justice Department said.

Stuart
Gulliver described this level of drug money laundering as a ‘mistake’!

Hmmmmm!

Of
course, at the same time as engaging in money laundering on an eye-watering
scale, HSBC was offering its high-net worth clients an opportunity to engage in
institutionalised levels of tax evasion, through the facilities offered by
their Swiss branch in Zurich.

Of
course, we have no means of knowing how much money HSBC was taking in terms of
profits and revenues for providing this service. But one must imagine it was not
insignificant.

Stuart
Gulliver later apologised for the damage this episode had caused to the bank’s
reputation.

Hmmmmm.

More
recently there have been the huge fines which HSBC has had to pay for their
part in the Libor and Forex manipulation escapades.

In
the Forex scam, one HSBC trader complained in an email to another team member
who had not given him the information he needed: “You are useless... how can I
make free money with no fucking heads up.”

Now,
it appears that HSBC has got a lot of difficult questions to answer following
the revelations in the FIFA bribery scandal.

Some
of those questions involve transactions including;

*A $1.2m wire transfer from a Traffic bank
account in Miami to a correspondent HSBC account in Buffalo, New York, which
was then sent to a HSBC Hong Kong account of a front company for another
co-conspirator on November 13, 2012

*Two
wire transfers of $750,000 and $250,000 from the HSBC Hong Kong account to a
New York account of Standard Chartered, for credit to a Cayman Islands account
held by Kosson Ventures, a company controlled by Costas Takkas, the attaché to
Fifa vice president Jeffrey Webb on November 21, 2012

*A $500,000 payment from another sports
marketing company on December 5 2013 for credit to the HSBC account of a luxury
yacht maker in London. Barclays and HSBC have not commented on the matter.

Why
am I not surprised.

The
purpose behind my reiterating these disgraceful events is to amplify the level
of wrong-doing and criminal law-breaking which HSBC has indulged in the past
years, activities which have generated huge profits for them, profits which
have lined the pockets of their investors.

HSBC
has behaved exactly like a main-stream Mafiosi crime group, engaging in
criminal behaviour as a matter of course, and taking inflated profits from the
outcome of these activities.

Had it
been any other organisation which had engaged in these criminal enterprises,
the Government would have had little choice than to throw the book at them,
ordering wholesale criminal investigations and demanding serious penalties and
sentences.

For
some reason, because these actions are committed by banks, no-one is at all fazed
by these actions. The regulators have done little or nothing to bring this
recalcitrant bank to heel, and all Stuart Gulliver has done is to wring his
hands and apologise ineffectively.

So
now, Mr Gulliver has announced his plans to readjust his banking empire.

HSBC has
been under severe pressure since the 2008 financial crisis to cut costs, meet
stringent new regulatory demands and satisfy restless shareholders.

To that
end, the British bank said on Tuesday that it would shed as many as 50,000 of
its approximately 250,000 jobs as it sells several underperforming businesses,
reduces the size of its global investment banking business and tries to cut
billions of dollars in costs.

The
latest moves are part of HSBC’s major strategic revamping . As part of the
newest changes, HSBC said it would increase its investment in Asia, where it
generates more than half of its earnings. The bank has been evaluating whether
to move its headquarters to Hong Kong from London, and it said it would
complete that review by the end of the year.

The bank,
which traces its roots to Hong Kong and used to be called the Hongkong and
Shanghai Banking Corporation when it was founded, still has close ties to the
Asia-Pacific region. Asia accounted for 78 percent of the bank’s pre-tax profit
in 2014.

Mr.
Gulliver is under increasing pressure to satisfy investors after recent scandals
damaged the lender’s reputation. HSBC also faces an increasingly challenging
regulatory environment in Britain and across the globe. The bank’s shares have
fallen about 2.4 percent in the last year.

“We
recognize that we need to do a lot more to address the changing environment,”
Mr. Gulliver said.

Among the
moves announced on Tuesday, the bank said it would eliminate 22,000 to 25,000
full-time jobs, or about 10 percent of its work force, by the end of 2017.
About 8,000 of the job cuts are expected in Britain, where HSBC employs about
46,000 people.

The
bank faces a major conflict of interests.

Its
investors and shareholders are complaining vociferously that the bank is not
paying the level of dividends they are used to. Well, this is hardly surprising,
the bank has been forced to step back from its organised criminal enterprises,
and has had to start to make money out of straight-forward vanilla banking
activities.

They
have discovered the truth of one of my major assertions which is that the
global banks cannot return the same level of investment revenue without committing
criminal offences.

They simply cannot make the profits they have hitherto made,
without breaking the law, and the increased regulatory environment, which is
long overdue, is making it so much harder for the dirty banks to make dirty
profits.

They
are responding by a major policy of staff-shedding, and by almost certainly
shedding their UK retail arm.

They
are reverting to an earlier incarnation whereby they will focus their business
attention on China and the Far East. Well, this at least should help them build
up their profits again, because this area of the world is notorious for the
movement of the proceeds of corruption and other forms of dirty money. If they
move their HQ from London and re-engage in Hong Kong, they should be able to
get back to their dodgy business activities without too much of a time-break.
They started life as a drug bank to British opium dealers in the nineteenth
century, and their recent activities in Mexico demonstrate that they had clearly
forgotten nothing in the interim.

I
don’t personally think it will do them much good. The American have now got
HSBC clearly in their sights, their latest escapades in the FIFA money
laundering will not have gone down well with the US authorities.

Even
if they relocate to Hong Kong, the US law enforcers can reach out to them there
if they continue to transact business in US dollars. However, there is too much
dirty money floating around in China and the Far East for HSBC to resist, and I
predict that if they do go back (I still think it is unlikely), they will be up
to their elbows in black money before you can say ‘Fei Chien’ (flying money)!

These
latest proposals by HSBC management are yet another attempt to bring pressure
on the UK Government, to back pedal on the implications of the new regulatory
environment, the ring-fencing of retail banks, and the new regime of anti-money
laundering.

The
Government must not weaken in their resolve to force these criminal enterprises
to get back to the straight and narrow. By making a significant number of UK
employees redundant and by chopping British jobs, as a programme of
re-positioning, HSBC are throwing down a gauntlet to George Osborne. ‘Look how
much damage we can cause to British jobs if you force us to smarten up our act’.

This
is yet another example of the culture of bullying these banks operate within
and shows, if such a lesson needed learning, that they have no concern for UK
workers and who are expendable when the bank’s creditors start pushing for more
and bigger dividend payments.

The
cynicism behind this action is breathtaking, and George Osborn needs to
remember this when ‘friends’ of Stuart Gulliver start jockeying and lobbying
for him to be given a knighthood!

Sunday, June 07, 2015

The Sunday Business supplements are all carrying stories
about George Osborne’s plans to offer an olive branch to HSBC in the form of a
levy retreat.

The Sunday Times reports that Osborne is expected to use
the opportunity of his forthcoming Mansion House speech on Wednesday to lay the
ground for a review of the bank levy, in an attempt to head off a threat that
HSBC and Standard Chartered Banks may leave the UK and relocate their HQ’s
elsewhere.

Osborne is expected to offer a typical platitude of
saying that the Conservative Government is committed to maintaining the
‘competitiveness of banks’, whatever that means!

The levy is a global charge on bank assets and it was
introduced by the last Coalition Government as a means of helping to raise
money to counter the appalling damage caused to the country and its economy by
the criminal rapaciousness of the banks in the run-up to the financial crisis.

We must never forget that it was the criminal
irresponsibility of the banks, exacerbated by the greed and dishonesty of the
banking sector employees which predicated the collapse in banking values and
which identified the creation of a mountain of debt, supported by little more
than hot air, and lies.

The Government was forced to extend multi-billions of
tax-payers’ funds to shore up criminal institutions which were in severe danger
of collapsing due to mis-management, hubris, incompetence, and downright
fraud,but no-one within the banking
sector was brought to justice or sent to gaol for their dishonesty.

Imposing a levy on bank assets was nothing more than a
legitimate and much-needed requirement to begin to redress the balance sheet
and make the banks realise just how irresponsible they had been. Nothing hurts
banks more than Government imposing a tax on their assets. Fines don’t hurt
because they are paid by the shareholders.

And the banks’ response?

Well, they have huffed and puffed, and postured and
threatened, in fact behaved exactly like the bullies they are. They have
reached out to their friends in the media and in the PR business, and
encouraged them to peddle soft-soap stories about the damage that might be
caused if they ‘are forced’ to leave the UK.

Excuse me, what ‘damage’ which might be caused! Haven’t
they caused enough damage already with their criminal actions and dishonest
business methods. Haven’t they brought the name of the British banking sector
into disrepute everywhere in the world by their refusal to comply with the
simplest regulations, designed to protect the integrity of business and protect
client’s funds?

Instead of acknowledging their disreputable tactics and
dishonest methods, and invested enough time and energy into developing a new
climate of best practice and compliance, they have moaned and whined, bleated
about the unfairness of being accused of wrong-doing, and then, when the
Americans started to dish out some really serious penalties, and started
kicking some well-tailored butts properly, they complained at the unfairness of
the fact that a foreign regulator was hitting them harder than their own
people.

Having been dealt with for laundering vast sums of money
for foreign organised criminal entities, and breaking international sanctions
on an institutionalised scale, one might have thought that these egregious
crooks would shut up and stay quiet, but instead, they have begun to posture
and preen and contest the legitimacy of the plans that the Government has to
try and introduce a better regime of control and client protection into their
banking sector.

One unnamed banker (how typical, these creatures never
want their name to be known in public) has said that a mere change to the
banking levy might not be enough to keep HSBC in Britain. “...’It’s not just
the levy’, he said, ‘it’s the ring fence (the forced separation of retail and
investment banking), coupled with the new regulations for senior managers, (the
regime which applies special responsibilities to senior bankers which could
make them liable to go to gaol in the event of the collapse of their bank),
‘it’s everything...”

When the proverbial brown stuff was hitting the air
conditioning about banking fraud, the constant complaint was that no-one could
be prosecuted because no-one was to blame. When proposals were laid for a new
regime of responsibilities, identifying senior bankers as those who must, in
return for their ludicrous salaries, perks, benefits and bonuses, be considered
to be responsible for the control of banks, they suddenly all jumped up in
panic and denied ever wanting to be considered to be a responsible person.

I don’t know about you, but this says everything to me
about what the insiders know about the level of criminality inherent in the
banking sector.

They have been doing what they always do in these
circumstances, and have spent a lot of time and money, lobbying H.M.Treasury
over the quality and content of what they consider to be Draconian regulations.

One wonderful UK based fund manager (how these people
always fail to appreciate the stupidity of their public utterances)has been quoted as saying;

“...HSBC could free up about £1 billion of cash to share
out with shareholders if it didn’t have to pay the levy...I hope it leaves, it
would teach the Government a lesson...”

This person has clearly forgotten the level of fines and
costs and lawyer’s fees HSBC has had to pay out to regulators for committing
global criminal offences. I imagine the share out for the shareholders would be
significantly more if HSBC had decided to obey the law instead, and not got
caught committing minor peccadilloes such as laundering billions of dollars for
the Mexican mafia drug cartels, among some more of its esoteric acrivities!

It is this kind of rank hypocrisy that always makes me
laugh when I hear the moans of some of these bloated plutocrats who think that
the City of London is their personal private playground and none of the UK’s
laws should apply there!

Even members of the ‘Great and Good’ are lining up to
tell Osborne what to do about the issue of financial ring-fencing.

Sir David Walker, who once headed up the now deeply
discredited regulatory body, the Securities and Investments Board, has said
there was ‘an urgent and compelling need’ to review the ring fence scheme.

Just in case you are not fully au-fait with this esoteric
piece of banking practice, the ring-fence requirement is one which makes it
imperative for big banks to put their retail arms into stand-alone companies by
2019.

I know, it’s a truly shocking requirement, and one which
should make any self-respecting banker puce with anger! After all, it means
that the funds of depositors will be sacrosanct, protected, ring-fenced from
the capital availability of the wholesale arm of the bank, and not available to
be used to underpin any dodgy financing ploy or scheme which the financiers and
the investment bankers might be wanting to hatch.

It means that in the event of the wholesale arm of the
bank going belly-up through some wild frolic of its managers, the funds of the
clients of the bank will not be put at risk (which will of course limit the
amount of compensation which depositors would need to claim from the Depositors
Protection Scheme). The effect of this requirement would therefore be to
encourage depositor confidence and to limit the damage that might be caused to
their savings that could be caused by the banks engaging in a similar kind of
wild speculation they were indulging in, prior to the financial crisis!

No wonder the bankers don’t want this requirement to
stand, and it is a red line which Osborne must not cross.

No, all this talk of leaving the UK and relocating to
other countries is a lot of hot air.

It is the usual kind of gamesmanship that these rank
bullies indulge in when they cannot immediately get their way when they demand
it.

Why am I so positive?

Right now, the City of London is the head of the global
banking world and they are safer here than they would be elsewhere. HSBC is
still under fire from the fall-out from its Swiss arm’s, tax-evasion scandals,
and there are no doubt a number of US citizens whose funds may have been
embroiled in this fiasco. The US authorities will take a very dim view of any
such actions and will be looking for investigatory cooperation. There is also
the small matter of the handling of the FIFA bribes cash. The deferred prosecution
agreements still extant in the US mean that the American arm of HSBC is still
needing to stump up singularly large sums of capital adequacy.

Moving back to Hong Kong will also have a reputational
risk issue as well. Many investment professional are eyeing such a possible move
with positive approval, believing, most probably quite accurately, that
operating in a less well-regulated environment will mean that HSBC can earn
bigger profits and thus pay bigger dividends. But there is a downside!

Most investors couldn’t give a flying fig for the reputation
of the environment within which the money that pays their returns on investment
is made, they just want to be paid as much as possible.

So although a move back to Hong Kong would mean happier
shareholders, it would also be another dodgy reputational move. Based in Hong
Kong, the Americans would look upon HSBC with positive distaste and be most
unwilling to give them the benefit of the regulatory doubt, next time they get
into trouble. And get into trouble they will, it’s in their DNA!

All in all, I do not believe that all the wives of the
HSBC directors fancy too long an extended stay in Hong Kong. Nice for a visit,
but a bit too claustrophobic for any great length of time.

My money is on them staying in the City for the
foreseeable future, because that is where the centre of financial power lies.

Speaking entirely for myself, I would love to see the
back of them, but I don’t think it’s likely to happen. If they do stay, they
must be made to comply with the regulatory standards that the FCA demands, and
if they fail, then they must be made to pay commensurately.

Saturday, June 06, 2015

This question is predicated by a column heading in The
Times of June 5th entitled “...Now Lloyds faces £100 million fine
for PPI complaints mishandling...”

The
Financial Conduct Authority found the state-backed group had wrongly denied
compensation to customers over payment protection insurance (PPI) - the wider
scandal that has already cost Lloyds £12 billion.

I have repeatedly stated that the British banks behave as
if they are a law unto themselves, and they keep on proving me right.

They conduct themselves in the most blatantly
criminogenic manner, committing financial crimes on a wholesale basis. They
conduct themselves like early 20th century Mafiosi crime gangs, and
it appears that nothing can be done to bring them to heel!

Sorry,
someone help me please! What is this ‘mishandling’ we are now being told about?

It
relates to a period from March 2012 to May 2013 when the group assessed
customer complaints relating to more than 2.3 million PPI policies and rejected
37% of those - many of them wrongly.

Lloyds
apologised to customers affected.

Staff at Lloyds largest complaints handling centre were
deliberately and cynically being taught ways to ensure customers got the minimum
or no compensation, including initially rejecting claims, as many people, it
was believed, would not pursue the matter.

The FCA
found that in March 2012, Lloyds issued guidance to complaint handlers that its
overriding principle when assessing complaints should be that PPI sales
processes "were compliant and robust unless told otherwise".

This
resulted in some of them dismissing customers' personal accounts of what had
happened to them during the PPI sale.

In
addition, Lloyds did not notify complaint handlers of known failings that had
been identified in its PPI sales process.

Some
customers were told that their complaint had been "fully
investigated" when this was not the case.

Oh right, I’ve got it now, ‘mishandling’ is just another bankers’
weasel word for the deliberate and wilful ignoring of the regulator’s stated requirements
that the bank should recompense clients for the cynical and deliberate exercise
of fraud and criminality they had engaged in for years.

I mean, it was not as if Lloyds didn’t have form for
dragging their feet over paying back the money they had nicked from their
hapless clients. Only 2 years ago, Lloyds was fined £4.3 million for delays in
making compensation payments to more than 100,000 clients who had been
defrauded in the so-called PPI-mis-selling scam. (Mis-selling was another piece
of verbal double dealing, and meant fraud on an institutional scale)!

Clearly, that fine taught Lloyds not to do it again and
get into compliance, and this is what I mean when I pose the question; ‘What
can be done to get these bastards to toe the line?

Their response to their regulator was no doubt to issue a
lot of verbal garbage about putting customers first, and learning lessons from
the past, but in reality, they were merely sticking two fingers up at the FSA
and then the FCA, and carrying on ignoring the instructions of the regulator.

The big problem is that the regulatory agencies must
start to behave as if they really do mean business and stop mealy-mouthing about
what they see as their regulatory responsibility.

They have a raft of penalties available to them,
including one which enables them to define an individual in the industry as
‘not fit and proper’ to have the control of a regulated entity.

I believe that this finding ought to be directed at every
member of the Lloyds main board, and they should start packing their bags
immediately and clearing their desks. They have openly connived at PPI
wrongdoing for years, and now, when the chips are down and they are required to
pay for their misdeeds, they simply do everything in their power to avoid the
likely consequence of their criminal actions.

The fine
is the largest ever retail banking penalty imposed by the authority - other
larger charges have related to trading scandals such as Libor benchmark
rate-rigging and foreign exchange rate manipulation. But fines are not a proper
penalty for board members who simply will not do what they are instructed to do
by their regulator. They have to be taught a hard and painful lesson, and we
should start by ejecting them from the financial sector for life. Fines are not
paid by these mafia goombahs personally, their impact falls entirely on the
shoulders of the shareholders of the bank, so other means have to be found to
name, shame and punish these organised criminals.

Lloyds
has been the worst-hit by the PPI mis-selling scandal, having set aside a total
of £12 billion out of a running total for the whole industry of £26 billion.

Georgina
Philippou, acting director of enforcement and market oversight at the FCA
offers the usual regulator-speak bromides by way of public statement. She is
reported to have said: "If trust in financial services is going to be
restored following the widespread mis-selling of PPI, then customers need to be
confident that their complaints will be treated fairly.

"The
size of the fine today reflects the fact that so many complaints were
mishandled by Lloyds.

"Customers
who had already been treated unfairly once by being mis-sold PPI were treated
unfairly a second time and denied the redress they were owed. Lloyds' conduct
was unacceptable."

Making
public utterances such as these go nowhere near defining the level of egregious
conduct or dishonest behaviour that Lloyds has engaged in.

Ms
Philippou frankly needs to rethink her approach to her role. If she honestly
believes, after all this time and evidence of concerted wrong-doing and
criminal damage that has been caused to the banking public that ‘trust in
financial services is going to be restored’, she is kidding herself. Trust in
banking will never be restored until the mafia bosses who are running these
organised crime families are brought low and gaoled, named and shamed for their
wilful failure to run decent and honest institutions.

Instead
what are we faced with? More public utterances which manage to diminish the
sheer scale of the wrong-doing to a level equivalent to cheating at Scrabble.

Mr
Horta-Osorio (Lloyds Bank CEO) said: "We made mistakes in our handling of
some PPI complaints. I am very sorry for this. We have been working hard with
the FCA to ensure all customers receive appropriate redress.

"That
process is now substantially complete. We remain fully committed to improving
our operational procedures and ensuring we do the right thing for our
customers."

Yeah,
yeah, yeah, yadda, yadda, yadda! It’s just the same old, same old, all over
again, until the next time. And there will be a next time, depend on it. These
banking crime gangs can’t make their numbers, and their executives cannot get
their obscene bonuses without committing major crimes. They are already proving
that as bank after bank cuts down on what were once big revenue generators, but
which are now, increasingly unprofitable business centres.

Today's
fine comes days after the Government fired the starting gun on a £4 billion
"Tell Sid"-style share sale to be launched within the next 12 months
as it seeks to sell off more of the taxpayer stake in Lloyds.

Lloyds
was rescued by the taxpayer at the height of the financial crisis, but the
Treasury's holding has since been shrunk from 43% to just under 19% as parcels
of it have been disposed of on the stock market.

The group
has faced a series of fines in recent years. Last July it was hit with
penalties totalling £218 million by the FCA and US regulators over benchmark
rate-rigging practices.

These
included an attempt to rip off the Bank of England over its financial life
support scheme, behaviour described as "highly reprehensible" by Bank
governor Mark Carney.

In
December 2013, Lloyds was fined £28 million over incentive schemes that
rewarded staff with "champagne bonuses" and put advisers under pressure
to hit sales targets or face demotion.

Lloyds
has a rap-sheet longer than that of Ronnie Kray!

They have
repeatedly committed gross financial crimes of every kind, and they keep on
getting fined for wrong-doing.

Not
that any of this seems to impact upon Mr Horta-Osorio? I don’t want to give the
impression that he has not been impacted by these fines, the chief executive’s
bonus was reduced, by about £360,000, but he could still be in line for a £4m
payout from bonuses awarded in 2012 and 2013 – the period when the bank was
found to be treating customers unfairly – and another £6.4m from a long-term
scheme.

A £10.4
million bonus, eh? That should take the sting out of any opprobrium he might
receive for treating his customers unfairly!

George
Osborne has gone on the record today saying the time for banker bashing is
over, that the banks have reformed and are operating under new rules!

He
is wrong, the leopards have not changed their spots, and they will continue to
rip off their customers at every opportunity. They can’t help it, it is
engrained in their DNA. We must continue to bash these bastards at every
possible opportunity!

About Me

Having spent my career dealing with financial crime, both as a Met detective and as a legal consultant, I now spend my time working with financial institutions advising them on the best way to provide compliance with the plethora of conflicting regulations and laws designed to prevent and forestall money laundering - whatever that might be! This blog aims to provide a venue for discussion on these and aligned issues, because most of these subjects are so surrounded by disinformation and downright intellectual dishonesty, an alternative mouthpiece is predicated. Please share your views with what is published here from time to time!